


Misty Morning Grey

by simplyprologue



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Angsty Schmoop, F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Post - Season 2, Sleepy Cuddles, Snow, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-05
Updated: 2014-10-05
Packaged: 2018-02-19 22:57:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2405975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three weekend mornings the winter after their engagement.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Misty Morning Grey

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** A few drabbles originally from my tumblr, but I thought they all went nicely together as a collection so I figured I'd archive them over here as well. There's another (new) thing that should be posted this afternoon that I've written based off of some of the footage in the trailer.

**i.**

Ever since she began moving into the apartment (neither of them can quite point at the moment it started during pre-trial discovery, exactly at which fraction of his closet she took over it began, how big her make-up bag on his counter got and decreed that the bathroom, too, is half hers) he’s made a point to smoke out on the balcony.

She told him quietly after the engagement that cigarette smoke reminds her of chain-smoking marines on duty, sitting in Humvees, IEDs exploding during smoke breaks on patrol. (“I know, I’m a sorry excuse for a newsman. Woman. Whatever.”) Will unfolded her arms from around her middle, kissed her until she forgot it all, and promised to quit.

A call from Becca wakes him up early one Sunday in December. Sighing, he hangs up and shakes his head at the newest complication in the Dantana suit and pulls a discarded sweatshirt over his head and slips out onto the terrace with a half-full pack of cigarettes and his lighter. The nicotine fit is over by the second drag, but his nerves are singing and there’s something to watching cigarette smoke filter out between snowflakes drifting gently down from heavy grey clouds.

"They’re calling for a rotten couple of days," Mac told him yesterday, half watching the news while working on something else he was entirely dedicated to distracting her from. "We’ll need to consider figuring something out in case the staff needs to camp out."

It’s getting easier, quitting. A few months ago he would have lit a second cigarette off the first, and then a third, until he couldn’t feel his feet. Avoiding the snow drifts, Will tamps the cigarette butt out in a snow-dusted ash tray, and heads back in. Closing the door quietly behind him, he discards the sweatshirt again and lifts the collar of his tee-shirt to his nose to make sure that smoke hasn’t clung to thin cotton.

MacKenzie has pulled the covers over her head in his absence—all he sees of her is a spill of dark hair over a white pillowcase.

Carefully, he crawls back into bed beside her. He reaches for her, lip curling when his cold hand hits heated bare skin at her waist. Pulls his hand back, and fists his fingers into her silk pajama top to warm them up.

"You’re cold," she murmurs sleepily, rolling towards the center of the bed to sandwich his half-numb feet between hers.

 

**ii.**

It’s been a cold and dry January, which makes it worse. Cold and dry and they’re stressed beyond the bounds of their sanity, and she keeps waking up with her face pressed between Will’s shoulder blades. Somewhere late in November he stopped sleeping on his back, started taking more naproxen and overcompensating for the knotted muscle in the lower left quadrant of back with his right leg.

MacKenzie brings him coffee and the bottle of oxycodone from his medicine cabinet, and slides back into bed, curling around him from behind.

"Don’t wanna go to the office," he mutters, taking her hand from where it rests on his stomach and bringing it up to his lips.

She hums. “We don’t have to. I don’t think we told anyone we were planning on it, and Becca gave her staff the weekend off. We don’t have to go anywhere.”

"You sure?" He kisses her fingertips one by one, and groans when he tries to push his knees down from where they’re curled up towards his chest. Something in his lower back realigns with a deep hollow _pop_ and he shivers, rolling half onto his stomach and bringing in his arms close to his chest.

"I’m sure," she murmurs, pulling the blankets up higher around him. "I got your Vicodin from the cabinet. Take it, honey." Carefully, she crawls over him and reaches for the prescription bottle and his coffee, waiting patiently while he tries to sit up. Blinking blearily, hair mussed in every which way, he manages to push himself up onto his elbows. But he doesn’t smirk at the way she’s looming over him, so she shakes out one of the pills and puts it in his hand without a word, and when he tosses it back into his mouth, gives him his coffee.

Will manages a few gulps before collapsing back against the mattress.

"You’re marrying a broken down old man," he mutters, more tendons giving way when he tries to find a position that doesn’t send pain knifing up his back or down his leg. The deep shadows under his eyes and grey pallor to his skin isn’t helped at all by the silvery winter light filtering in through the windows.

Smiling in a small way and exhausted herself from a distinct lack of sleep and too much Ambien to compensate when she has the _time_ to sleep, she rubs the heel of her hand in circles in the small of his lower back. “Hey, don’t talk about my fiancé like that.”

"You want me for my money."

She snorts, digging the muscle at the base of her thumb into the tensed muscles near the top of his hips. “It looks like Jerry may be taking that, considering what’s mine is about to become what’s yours and what’s mine is a multimillion dollar lawsuit alleging discriminatory firing practices.”

Will moans, half-pained and half-relieved, in a way that is distinctly disagreement. “Well, you don’t want me for my body,” he says weakly.

"There are certain parts of your anatomy that I’m rather fond of," she teases, taking the opportunity to pinch his ass under the duvet, ignoring how hoarse her voice is, a remnant from the five hour meeting with legal they had last night, going over every shred of evidence for the umpteenth time. "Now shut up, you big baby, and let me perform my wifely duties and take care of you."

To his credit, once she gets back under the covers and dedicates her thumbs to digging ruthlessly into the small of his back, he stops talking. Soon enough, her kneading hands and the drugs send him back to sleep. Tucking her head into the nape of his neck, Mac does the same.  

 

**iii.**

Things are different now. MacKenzie, for instance, padding through his apartment in nothing but one of his flannel shirts button twice in the middle, black lace panties, and wool socks, even though the power has been out for hours and the temperature in the apartment is dwindling into the fifties.

She gives him a coy smile, and speaks of fifteen degree days on a military base in Afghanistan without heat. And then hands him a mug of coffee—“I lived with marines for almost three years, there’s no keeping them from their coffee, I’ve learned”—with instant grounds tied into a coffee filter, water heated in a saucepan from the pilot light on his stove. In many ways, he’s still learning who she’s become, how they fit together now. It’s better, in many ways, but strange. He has fallen in love with her so many times over again at this point, knows her more and well and differently.

And she, him.

“Thank you,” he says.

MacKenzie tells him about nights she and Jim spent huddled together in barracks, in caves, waiting out the base being shelled or their location being shot at by the Taliban, trying to file stories with frozen fingers and scrambled IP addresses. Will tells her about nights in the farmhouse that couldn’t be heated because his dad drank all the gas money, and the cord of wood in the barn was wet because he drank the money to repair the roof, too. Cold, dark nights where his dad drank to keep warm and only wound up colder, and backhanded Will when he explained that alcohol is a vasodilator and only makes you feel warmer, actually increases the chance of hypothermia—

He read too much as a child.

“I could make eggs, or something,” she says, running kisses down the side of his jaw. “We have bacon, right?”

She goes out into the cold for him. No one’s done that before.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
